The Sam Reilly Collection

by Christopher Cartwright

  It was only after its loss, that John had discovered the real value behind the great painting, which made it far more valuable than the 80 million dollars that the assessor suggested it could fetch at auction.

  Only after the efforts of a billionaire and luck of the impending catastrophe of Cyclone Charlotte, was John able to reacquire the painting.

  John stared at it for a moment.

  He cared little for the artwork itself, and wondered what his father would have said if he’d known what he’d hidden in plain sight for most of his lifetime. Either way, it was on its way home now, and John only hoped it wouldn’t destroy the world.

  He let the phone ring once only, then picked up the handset.

  John was expecting the call. Dreading it almost as much as he longed to receive it, so that it would finally be over.

  He noticed the small tremors on his otherwise still hand.

  That’s new, he thought.

  “John, is this line secure?” The man spoke English; the tone of which could only be mastered by one of the British aristocratic elite. An accent acquired at Oxford or even Cambridge, he guessed. It was a voice that betrayed the speaker’s lavish breeding. It had been years since he’d actually heard this man’s voice, but despite that, he recalled it as though it had been only yesterday.

  And, after the information he received yesterday, he had no doubt that the man would contact him today about it.

  “It is,” he said, unwilling to say more.

  “Have they been taken care of?” The man on the phone sounded displeased.

  “Yes.”

  “All of them? Are you certain?”

  “Yes. I took care of the last person myself.” John was unused to being questioned like this by anyone, even the man on the other side of the phone.

  “Now, how long before we have it?” The man's voice was coarse, sounding like that of someone in their eighties, who had spent a lifetime smoking tobacco.

  John nearly choked on his 30year-old Glenfarclas whiskey. He looked up at his recent acquisition on the wall, terrified that this man knew about it already.

  But how could he know? I didn’t even know its value until three months ago.

  Suddenly remembering exactly why this man had called, John responded with his prepared response, “The thing’s been missing for seventy-five years. It may still take some time before it’s found. Things generally are when they wish to remain lost. And this was supposed to disappear forever. It’s a hard area to search, but we’ve already got people over there. Once they find her, we’ll send in our own team to retrieve it. It’s not like we can send in a team of mercenaries without anyone noticing. We have to be extremely careful exactly who we do send to do this, and we must be discreet, otherwise we’ll have every treasure hunter after her.”

  “Do I need to remind you of the consequences if you fail to deliver it?”

  “Fuck you!” John was done being servile. The man on the other end of the line might be his master, but he was long past his willingness to be treated like a dog by anyone. “I’m well aware of the outcome if I fail. I know exactly how dangerous this thing is.”

  “Good. Then at least, in that, we are in agreement.” The man coughed and then said, “I will call you in a week to see how you have progressed.”

  “No, you won’t. I’ll call you when we have it, and if you’d like to be the first to have her in your possession, you will remember to permit me to do my job.”

  John hung up the sat phone, ending the call.

  On the desk in front of him, there was only one photo. It was a picture of him and his daughter at her graduation after she had completed her undergraduate degree at MIT. She had a big smile on her face, and you could see the pride on his own face from a mile away.

  He studied that picture for a moment.

  What have I done?

  *

  John Wolfgang had more phone calls to make.

  His business was worth a fortune, and he rarely slept for more than a few hours at a time these days.

  The company, which was started by his grandfather before Hitler lost the war, had a prolonged moratorium after his grandfather lost all credibility and financial support. John took over the family business shortly after the Berlin Wall came down. Since then, he had immigrated to the U.S., where his scientific acumen could take him further. His pharmaceuticals had saved millions of people worldwide, not to mention winning him the Nobel Prize for medicine.

  John placed the graduation photo back on his desk, his determination visible in his eyes.

  He was committed now and there was nothing he could do to change that.

  He knew when he first accepted the man’s help that it would be difficult to say no to him when it was time to return the favor. To fulfill this obligation would be unconscionable. However, failure to do so now was unthinkable. It all seemed so far away at the time, that John secretly believed it would never be found, nor that he would be the one to release its horrible wrath.

  All that he had worked for would be lost, because they had maintained control over him and over everything he held dear.

  As painful as this was, John would have been more than willing to suffer it all alone, the blame landing squarely upon his head; the price of fulfilling this obligation was too terrible for the world.

  Before he was even given a chance to falter in his obligation to the man he’d never met, a package arrived.

  We own you – don’t falter.

  Those were the only words displayed on the outside of the brown package. They were handwritten, in the carefree scrawl of someone who knew, without a doubt, that John would never go to the police.

  Its contents confirmed what he already knew, there was no way he could get out of this.

  It was a picture of his daughter. She was in her pajamas, having breakfast alone. John recognized the room. It was the 32nd floor penthouse he’d bought for her while she was still studying at MIT. It was a secure apartment, and he had taken steps to ensure few people knew where she lived.

  But somehow, they’d found her.

  They always would.

  How can a father bring himself to choose, between the well-being of billions of people, or the life of his only daughter, the one thing he’d managed to do right in his entire life.

  Mathematically, the equation appeared simple.

  To a father, the mathematics were irrelevant.

  He considered killing himself. Some part of him wished he’d simply have a fatal heart attack or some other form of death over which he had no control. He knew if he died, he’d fail to complete his obligation, and, as a result, his daughter would die. So killing himself wasn’t an option.

  No, he would go through with it, as he’d agreed to do all those years ago.

  John Wolfgang leaned back in his lounge chair, staring out the window of his Lear Jet, more than forty thousand feet above the earth over whose very existence he held so much power.

  It went all the way back to the start of the Second World War.

  To a story he’d heard from his father many times during his childhood, as the only child of a poor family living in post-war Germany.

  Walter Wolfgang, John’s father, had been a promising young microbiologist, who had been pursuing a PhD in viral adaptations to change. His supervisor, Professor Fritz Ribbentrop, immediately saw the promise of such research, and its potential danger to humanity.

  Walter had worked hard for three years on his project before discovering the strange mutation. It had been well established that viruses, such as influenza, naturally mutated from time to time, often becoming more easily transmittable. The virus’s undesired result of some of these mutations might often result in the death of the host.

  In theory, a virus wants to be symbiotic – living on or within a host organism, without draining its host of its strength and vitality.

  These changes occur every decade or so, to keep up with their host’s immune system, which is constantly adapting to bett
er protect itself from the virus. Every now and then, something strange happens, and the new viral strain leaps ahead of its host’s ability to protect itself, perhaps jumping ahead by two or three decades worth of random mutations and becoming stronger than the host’s natural immune system.

  One such strain that springs to the mind of any microbiologist is the Influenza H1N1 – AKA, the Spanish Flu pandemic, which occurred in the early twentieth century, decimating more lives worldwide than the First World War. This type of event generally occurs only every couple of centuries, or so.

  What Walter discovered, while attempting to speed up the rate of viral mutations in a controlled environment, was the genesis of a strain of influenza that had made several hundred steps towards evolution. The type of anomaly that would only occur once every couple of millennia, under normal circumstances.

  It had evolved in such a way that the longer it remained undetected, the safer it would be, and therefore, the greater would be its chance of propagating. In one study, Walter learned that its host would not display any symptoms whatsoever for an entire month after infection, and then would result in an astonishing 80% mortality rate.

  The implications of such a prolonged incubation period in a virus with such a phenomenal mortality rate were immediately obvious to him.

  It could wipe out 80% of the planet’s population.

  He brought this discovery to the attention of his mentor and friend, Professor Fritz Ribbentrop.

  Walter’s original thought was he should destroy it immediately, but Ribbentrop had a different viewpoint. What would happen if this anomaly occurred naturally at some time in the future? Could their investigations now possibly save the entire planet from what might prove to be the worst plague ever faced by mankind in recorded history, at some future date?

  In the minds of scientists, who had no loyalties to either good or bad, but only wanted to further man’s knowledge, such a discovery could only be viewed as a good thing.

  The next day, the riots began and ended with the raids on Jewish families, heralding the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich and start of World War Two.

  Professor Fritz Ribbentrop was the first to point out what these events might mean for their discovery. “Do you understand the consequences of your discovery, given that the world is about to be plunged into the depths of a war?”

  “I will have to put my experiments on hold so that we can work towards the Führer’s goals for Germany.”

  “No, it is far more sinister than that.”

  “It is?” At such a young age, Walter failed to understand the harsh realities of where the world was headed.

  “You must now decide. On one hand, you have the key, which will almost certainly provide the Führer with the means to win this war, but on the other hand, in so doing you may end up destroying more lives than would be lost in a hundred years of fighting.”

  “Is that really the right question to ask?” Walter, even in his idealistic youth, was not wholly immune to the loyalty and might of the Fascist movement.

  Professor Ribbentrop watched him carefully, without betraying his hand. “Go on son, what would be the right question to ask?”

  “How can we protect our own troops from this virus?”

  “Yes, of course,” the Professor continued. Only the slightest hint of hesitation could be detected in his voice. “Prepare your viruses. Tomorrow, we start developing a vaccine. Collect your notes, and I will send them on to the Führer himself. He would want to be personally informed of a matter of such importance.”

  Walter made a copy for himself, and then sent his original notes to Professor Ribbentrop, who had assured him that he would personally bring them to the attention of the Führer.

  Two weeks passed, yet Walter had still not received any message from the Führer.

  He talked to Professor Fritz Ribbentrop about it, but the man seemed undeterred, and reminded Walter that the Führer was a very busy man.

  At first, Walter assumed that it was their academic professionalism which was causing the friction, but as time went by, he started to doubt Fritz’s loyalty. The problem was, he had no idea how to create a vaccination against the horrid virus. Fritz was possibly the only man alive who had the ability to develop it. Besides, it was ridiculous of him to question Fritz’s loyalty. The two of them were ardent supporters of the Third Reich, and Fritz specifically had supported and was a strong ally of his friend, Adolf Hitler.

  At the end of the two weeks, Walter decided to send a secret letter to the Führer, containing his findings and their potential in the field of biological warfare.

  The next day, Walter was picked up by the SS Police, who took him to a secret location, where Adolf Hitler himself greeted him warmly. Hitler reassured him of Fritz’s loyalty, but pointed out that a matter of such great importance required redundancies to ensure that the plan came to fruition. The Führer also reminded Walter that he was counting on him to make sure that Fritz maintained the undying loyalty he had always displayed to Germany.

  Two weeks after that, Professor Fritz Ribbentrop disappeared.

  All traces of the virus with him.

  When the Gestapo told Walter that Professor Ribbentrop had boarded an airship and escaped, he was certain that Germany would now lose the war.

  As a punishment for this failure, he was conscripted and given the rank of private in the infantry.

  It was a death sentence, and a total waste of an intellect such as his, which could have been put to better use in so many other war efforts.

  Despite the punishment, Walter remained true to the regime’s core values, proudly believing that he was doing his part to win the war for Germany.

  Despite the highly improbable chances of his survival, Walter did succeed in living through the war, but, unfortunately, a remaining high-ranking official leaked the information that Walter’s mistake had resulted in Germany losing the war.

  In the starving depression of postwar Germany, Walter was treated with contempt, and he was unable to gain employment as anything better than a common street cleaner. His wonderful mind was utterly wasted for the second time by Germany’s remaining leaders.

  In spite of everything that had befallen him, Walter married a woman named Alda in 1950. Notwithstanding living in socialist Eastern Germany, and although they were both poor and famished, the two were happy, and their son, John was born in 1952.

  Despite it being a new world, many members of the East German leadership still blamed Walter for his part in the loss of their pre-war living standards. He found it hard to get a job, and harder still to keep one. In 1962, when John was aged 10, his mother died during a particularly bad winter.

  John asked the question that his father had been dreading.

  “Why are we hated so?”

  Walter then told him the story about the missing Magdalena, which he discovered had never made it to her destination in Switzerland. He explained that if they could just find the Magdalena, he could forever change the course of their lives.

  In 1961, East Germany had become so frustrated by the mass exodus of its citizens to the west, they erected a wall between the two in order to prevent people from fleeing into West Berlin. Walter became infatuated with the dream of discovering the resting place of the Magdalena, and consequently, the virus, which he still saw as being the source of all of his misfortune.

  John, on the other hand, excelled at all his studies and dreamed of becoming a scientist someday. He ended up working at Humboldt University. It was the one bit of good luck the family had had since Walter discovered the virus.

  When the Berlin Wall came down on the 9th of November, 1989, John was 38 years old, and had become one of the leading microbiologists in the world, with little chance of achieving any financial security.

  He wanted, more than anything, to rekindle his father’s pharmaceutical company, but it would be another five years before he was given the opportunity to do so.

  In 1994, five years after the Berlin Wall ca
me crashing down, a man approached John. He appeared to be of Mediterranean descent, but he might just as easily have been from England, based on how perfectly accented his English sounded. The man offered him five million American dollars, a fortune, to support the development of John’s pharmaceutical company on behalf of his client. The only condition was that John must be willing to help the financial backer find the Magdalena, and provide him with a usable virus. The client would remain the legal owner of the company on secret papers, but all profits were John’s to keep.

  It seemed so simple at the time.

  A deal with the devil, perhaps – but what a deal!

  Why not take the chance? If the Magdalena and the virus she carried hadn’t been discovered in 55 years, why would it be discovered in his lifetime?

  Since then, his business had exceeded his every dream. He was rich, he had married a movie star, and they had produced a beautiful daughter. His wife had left him once she’d extracted enough of his money, but she left him with his daughter, so what did he care? His professional dreams were achieved when he won the Nobel Prize.

  He never once heard from his benefactor.

  There was never a request for a dividend or repayment of any kind.

  Until a week ago, he had all but forgotten about his humble beginnings and about his deal with the devil.

  When he was greeted by a much older man with olive skin and a pompous English accent, he didn’t immediately recognize the man. It was his accent that sounded completely out of place, which finally triggered his recollection.

  The Lear Jet banked to the left, and John settled in for a landing, dragging him out of his memories.

  A long time ago, he had indeed made a deal with the devil himself.

  Might a deal with another devil save me?

  John considered the question which he had turned over repeatedly in the past seven days, and for the first time, reached an answer.

  Yes. But to do that, I’ll have to be the first to find it.

  Chapter Eight

  Sam Reilly had discarded his Sea Scooter in the shrubbery and started the long, painful walk into town. It had been years since he’d been to Shoal Haven. He couldn’t quite remember how far it was to town, but he knew it wasn’t a long drive.